Kafka's Country Doctor - Imagination And Predicaments

* Franz Kafka's 'A Country Doctor' - imagination. Kafka's imagination in A Country Doctor? The hard stuff. The difficult bit in any writing is not the snappy grammar, not the control of sentence length and the frequency of measured clauses, but the actual 'thing' that you are going to set down on the page. If you want this sort of 'vivid', let's be clear, memories from your own life won't ever do it; lots of research around your theme won't ever do it either. You need an imagination like this one, don't you? Surely you need to write of horses that squeeze their way out of a pigsty, holding their legs ever so close together and wriggling their rumps; surely you must write of country-folk who strip you of your clothes and place you down in a sick-man's bed between his wound and the wall?

* Franz Kafka's 'A Country Doctor' - predicaments. Kafka and the ability to 'live' a predicament. Aren't Kafka's writings partly there for revisits whenever you want to re-experience - vividly, economically - what it is like to, say, be a burrow-dwelling creature, or be a hunger-artist, or, in this case, be a doctor forced to attend to one crisis at the expense of another? It could not have been written more vividly. The chilling suspicion of the danger your serving-girl is in; a 'giddy-up' and, seemingly, in an instant there you are miles away at the bedside of an ailing young man; finally you spot his wound alive with worms; you are confronted with a population of locals who understand little yet expect miracles, and it's a population that is quite ready to see you dead, 'only a doctor, only a doctor', in a creepy children's-choir sort of way.